The Glasses Half Full

This story is not about health policy, but maybe in the end, in a way, it is. Maybe it’s about the essence of what health policy should be. What international policy should be. What academia, and even patent law, look like in their finest hours.

For the most part, I will just allow this Washington Post story to speak for itself.

Joshua Silver, an Oxford atomic physicist who also teaches optics, designed a set of self-adjusting eyeglasses. He has spent the last two decades perfecting the “ugly” eyewear. The glasses are manufactured in China, and he is now in the process of distributing them to those who are unable to afford to partake in “the current business model for the industry that involves optometrists, opticians and labs making custom lenses and frames.” Thus far Mr. Silver has distributed his glasses with the help of the U.S. Dept. of Defense, the World Bank, and the British Government.

Though offered “a substantial amount of money" by a vision company for his patented technology, the inventor “declined because he had no assurance that it would be used to bring low-cost glasses to the poor.”

The Washington Post reports that Mr. Silver, “has attached plastic syringes filled with silicone oil on each bow of the glasses; the wearer adds or subtracts the clear liquid with a little dial on the pump until the focus is right. After that adjustment, the syringes are removed and the ‘adaptive glasses’ are ready to go…. The more liquid pumped into a thin sac in the plastic lenses, the stronger the correction.”

Currently, Silver said, a pair costs about $19, but his hope is to cut that to a few dollars.

Silver said he wants to provide eyeglasses to more than a billion people with poor eyesight. For starters, he hopes to distribute a million pairs in India over the next year or so.

He has distributed about 30,000 spectacles. The U.S. Department of Defense bought 20,000 pairs to give away to poor people in Africa and Eastern Europe. Those glasses have a small U.S. flag and "From the American People" engraved in small print on one side of the frames. The World Bank and the British government have also helped fund his work.

In the United States, Britain and other wealthy nations, 60 to 70 percent of people wear corrective glasses, Silver said. But in many developing countries, only about 5 percent have glasses because so many people, especially those in rural areas, have little or no access to eye-care professionals.

Even if they could visit an eye doctor, the cost of glasses can be more than a month's wages. This means that many schoolchildren cannot see the blackboard, bus drivers can't see clearly and others can no longer fish, teach or do other jobs because of failing vision.

"It's about education, economics and quality of life," Silver said.

One could certainly say the same thing about health and health care; and at a basic level, the health and health care proposition in human terms is simply sine qua non--"without which, not."

Having said that, one might hope that the Nobel Committee can see its way clear to Oxford.